Lauren Sánchez Bezos has said she spent most of her life hiding her dyslexia, even when she worked as a news reporter.
During Tuesday’s segment of the Today show, the former Emmy-winning journalist, 56, revealed that she wasn’t diagnosed with the learning disability until she was 19.
“My community college teacher … got me tested,” she said. “She literally looked at me, because I was like, ‘I can’t write,’ and she goes, ‘You’re not dumb, you just can’t spell. You were learning differently.”
Bezos continued: “I went through life hiding it, even when I was a news anchor; no one knew I was dyslexic, except my co-anchor [Rick Garcia]. And he would help me.
“He would see a word on the screen, and I’m going like this,” she added, making a face, “and he was, like, whispering in my ear.”
Dyslexia is a common language-based learning disability that affects as much as 15-20 percent of the global population, according to the International Dyslexia Association. While it impacts each person differently, “the core difficulty is with word recognition and reading fluency, spelling, and writing.”
Bezos, who has just released her new children’s book, The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea, said that she dedicated it to her college professor, Lori.
She shared that she hopes the book serves as a reminder to parents to read to their children. Emphasizing the importance of reading, she explained: “If you take just 10 minutes, you release what’s called oxytocin, you release it, and your child releases it. So on a biological level, when you read to your kid, you are bonding.”
She further noted that the book is also for children with learning differences, specifically dyslexia, adding that after she published her debut children’s book, The Fly Who Flew to Space, in 2024, several children approached her.
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“Some kids just see the world differently. I was one of them,” she wrote of the book on Instagram last week. “This book is for all of the kids who hide in the back of the class, afraid to be called on, worried they’re not smart enough.”
Bezos’s second book, out now, marks the entrepreneur’s first major project since her high-profile wedding to billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in Venice last August.
The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea follows Flynn after he takes a wrong turn on the way to Cape Canaveral, causing him to fly in frustration. “But what starts as a misstep soon becomes a grand voyage of discovery,” reads the book’s logline.
